


Past the Wit of Man

by TrinityVixen



Series: Free Folk AU [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, fair folk au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 15:24:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11671833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrinityVixen/pseuds/TrinityVixen
Summary: Those who remember the Free Folk can seek to curry their favor.





	Past the Wit of Man

The sweet smell of mead draws her to what one might charitably call a cottage, a wooden frame with bark paneling, twine made of vines at the joints. It is not a shelter made to last a man a long life, but it is one a traveling man might be grateful for to weather out a cold night. But there are signs of repair to the thatched roof and there is smoke billowing through a chimney hole at the center. Perhaps, then it is the domicile of a poor man, making do against the long nights of harshest winter.

Not so poor, though, as the honey wine has the aroma of quality—a drink fit for a lord. Too many have forgotten the Free Folk, have forgotten to make peace and bargain and bribe with them in return for a boon, but not so the tenant of this shack. It is a great sacrifice to her kind, and she lifts the earthenware saucer to sip at the liquid joy left outside the only sign of man in all the dark woods that she has roamed. She tastes orange blossoms and summer, elderflowers, honeysuckle and rain. It has none of the heaviness of the swill men drink, but reminds her instead of the ambrosia of her people. Her taste buds sing. Such an offering deserves an equally sumptuous favor, and she is the one to grant it.

“Hail, friend,” she calls out, her voice clear in the silence of evening.

There are soft footsteps in the dirt on the other side of the animal hide door, and a hand appears to move the covering away and then they are facing one another. He has the look of the North, long of face, dark of hair and beard, but skin almost as pale as her own. To him, she must seem an apparition, with her long, scarlet hair cascading over milky shoulders. Surprise raises his thick eyebrows, tightens the skin of his cheeks, over which are stretched many scars. A man, alone in a strange wood under desperate circumstances would, no doubt, be astonished to find a naked woman calling out to him on a frosty winter’s night. His gaze, after straying to her bare body, snaps resolutely back to hers.

He steps aside in the open doorway, an invitation and entreaty. “Will you…will you come in? You must be cold.” His accent, burred vowels and guttural syllables, confirms him for a Northman.

She accepts his offer of hospitality, amused as he shrinks away to avoid touching her, even on accident, as she crosses the threshold of his hovel. He plods in after her, fetching a thin blanket off a pallet of straw and holding it out to her. As a courtesy to him, she takes it, but its protection is none that she needs. Still, she savors in the feel of it, the warmth that must have come lately from his own body. He whisked the blanket off his own bed, a humble man’s kindness worth more than a rich man’s extravagance. This kindness she repays by not covering herself to him but placing the coverlet on the dirt and sitting upon it; she knows herself beautiful and thinks it a fair compensation for his consideration.

Wary of her and her boldness, he sits down on the exposed straw of his bed as far across his small cooking fire as is possible to sit without being rude. After a moment, a strange, sad smile appears, fleetingly as though trespassing, on his full lips, and he chuckles, once. His amusement is unusual; she is used to beguiling others, not being bemused by them.

“Share your jest with me, as you share your fire?”

He shakes his head. “It is nothing.” He shrugs, leans over to offer her food off a wooden plate. A meager meal, a bit of what smells like rabbit alongside some stewed greens and wild potatoes. A feast, for a poor man and one that solves more of the mystery of him. To his politeness, his obedience to the old ways, and his humble means, she deduces his skill with hunting and his appreciation of a varied, balanced meal. It suggests an upbringing outside these circumstances, perhaps.

In the end, she refuses his meal without apology but as kindly as she knows how. “I eat nothing outside of my own home.”

This appears to insult him, as he draws the plate back and rolls his eyes. “It isn’t poisoned,” he grunts, tearing at the rabbit with his teeth as if to prove it.

“I do not mean to offend. It is a rule.” A rule of her mother’s making and one she has kept to in all her wanderings. He regards her with a skeptical raised eyebrow.

“It is a custom where you are from to refuse a host’s food and walk around without clothes?”

She smiles and says nothing, and his sad smile from earlier makes a reappearance, which sets off a fluttering in her belly. Few have ever encountered her with such equanimity, although he does not soon forget her rejection of his food. “Are you sure you are not hungry? Where I come from, a guest is entitled to her host’s protection if she eats of his food.”

“I did not think I needed protection.” His chiding tone bristles, her spine straightens with the challenge. “Where I come from,” she continues, heat rising to her cheeks, “food is an entitlement also, but the obligation works the other way around.”

This exchange silences them both a short while. She takes in the contents of the rest of his home. As befits his apparent poverty, the straw pallet is the only bit of furniture. He has a few possessions besides—a well-oiled leather bag that her nose tells her is filled with parcels of salted meat, dried herbs; a bow and a quiver of arrows; and a sword that, even at a distance, has an edge she can feel. It is the only truly incongruous item in this place, and it calls to her, a song of savagery and blood. She touches a scar on her shoulder, one of many like it elsewhere on her body, made with steel’s edge.

His eyes track the movements of her fingers and stare through her looking for the meaning. Men often stare at her, in lust and awe, but his expression settles into more of that same melancholy as his smile. She watches him inspect her as she has done his home. Even in the dim light of his fire, he must see silver scars skating over her soft skin. There are so many.

His gloomy expression turns stormy. “Who has harmed you, lady?”

“Men,” she says. She traces the scars on her arms, tells the story as simply as she knows how. “Weapons forged of iron. Hatred. Jealousy. These are things that have marked me.”

He accepts her candor and her inexactness with the same preternatural calm, but none of the suspicion nor promise of violence fades from his sharp gaze. “I know it well.” He imitates her motion, runs the thick pad of his first finger along the marks on his face. “I have those marks, too, but love gave me these.”

“Love?” An unexpected answer, another surprise from this quiet fellow.

“The loss of it, the ending,” he says. “Not jealousy, not quite. Not anger either, but the death of joy.”

“Love should not aim to wound.”

His lips twist in a shape somewhere between a snarl and a smirk. “Love always wounds. It is easier to bear these scars than the others it left.”

Ah. This is more familiar territory. Her solemn companion is lovelorn. That, she can assist with, if not cure. It would be just recompense for his offering, even if he does not know it. She rises, circles around his fire to stand before him. He falls backwards onto his hands, and though his eyes are level with the cream-colored flesh of her thighs, his gaze still locked upon her own. Up close, she is more than lovely; she is desire made flesh, a shape built to exercise a man’s lusts and sate them. He swallows thickly, but he will not be distracted by her body.

So she decides to capture him with her touch. She crouches to bring her face to his, reaches out to caress his cheeks, and presses a kiss, fleeting and soft as butterfly feet to his mouth. His lips are chapped, the skin flaked and torn from exposure to the cold. He licks them when she draws away. She kisses the gnarled flesh of his cheek and brow, over the marks that do not mar his good looks but instead give them distinction. The marks represent wounds she cannot see, and she would bind them, if he would but ask. “Would you like me to heal those scars for you?”

In a daze, even as he shakes his head, he extends a hand to cup her jaw. She turns to kiss the inside of his wrist. He opens his mouth to say one thing, hesitates, then says another. “It is like you walked out of a dream.”

She laughs, a tinkling but genuine lightness in her belly. “Perhaps you dream me still.”

“If I do, then it is the last dream I will have.”

“Why?” She leans forward on her knees until they are almost pressed together, lays on thick the bindings of temptation all around him. “Why the last?”

“Old Nan,” he murmurs, his glazed eyes suddenly far away. “She said when the gods claim dead men, they send emissaries to lure them from life, to ease their way into the undying lands.”

This sort of fairy story she has heard before, a kinder one than most would ascribe to the Free Folk. Still, it is a tale of death, and yet he moves to embrace her, his calloused hands settling over the jutting bones of her hips. He shakes his head again, harder, to dispel the illusion he can touch, that is touching him. He closes his eyes, his long lashes casting shadows on his white skin. His eyelids are bruised from lack of sleep, and she is compelled to kiss them.

“Do I ease you?” She asks between kisses. “Are you lured?”

And then, despite the signs, he isn’t. His eyes fly open wide enough to show white all around, he jerks his chin out of her hands, catches her wrists to hold them away from his face, and scoots away from her as though he were about to tumble from a cliff’s edge. Which is more than fair as, in a way, he was. She is no emissary, not for gods, not for death, but she is her own sort of dangerous. As is he--his grip is strong enough to send a frisson of fear through her, recalling the unkind grasp of many men before him. As soon as she feels the tickle of threat, it is gone. He releases her, and she does not attempt to close the distance between them. Desire has folded its delicate wings and fled.

“Not today,” he mutters, carding his fingers through and tugging on the roots of his black hair. He will not meet her eyes. “Please, lady. Have pity on me. Leave me be.”

Pity does win out over panic, and she sits a distance away from him, arms wrapped around her bare legs to cover herself from his view. It is an offering of peace, a withdrawing of her seduction. It works, and he looks her way again.

“Have pity on yourself, friend,” she says, smiling. “The night is cold, and your fire can do only so much. Let me stay. Let me warm you.”

“You may stay, you needn’t—”

She holds up a hand to forestall further refusal. Her breast is bared to him in doing it, and she does not miss his eyes tracking along the slope of her soft flesh to its rose-tinted tip. It is harder, with her closer and the memory of the soft give of her flesh so recent, for him to ignore her as he had done earlier. The night may not be spoiled after all.

“I understand. Honor demands that your favor must be won, so let me win you.”

He is a proud man, set to refuse her once more, yet he is intrigued. “Would you fight me, lady? I have little of value to reward you if you win.”

She clicks her tongue at him, leers appreciatively at the lean shape of his muscles beneath his tunic. “I disagree.” She crosses her arms below her breasts, folds her legs at her sides so the flat expanse of her belly is on display. Her actions have their intended effect. The brown of his eyes recedes to black, his mouth hangs slightly open. All this she would give him, and yet she must barter with him for his own pleasure. Stubborn.

She throws her copper hair over one shoulder with a toss of her head. “We were talking of dreams, were we not?”

He nods, transfixed by the crimson cascading strands and the elegant curve of her neck.

“I can tell you of your dreams—what you were thinking of before I came to you this night. If I do, you will let me stay.”

A mummer’s trick, if she is honest, but her kind are not burdened with a need for honesty, not for others nor themselves. Men reveal themselves more readily than they imagine, so it does not take the Sight or any other gift to guess at their fantasies. The trap, in other words, is already set. He still must walk into it willingly.

He mirrors her, folding his arms over his chest and jerks his chin in her direction. “Go on then, guess my dreams. I will give you three chances.”

His imperiousness rankles, but the bargain is struck, and she will meet her end. She knows much already, however spare his condition. A Northman far from his home, living alone in a shack hardly fit for company. A poor man’s survival instincts—the repairs to the roof; a meal of rabbit and wild greens; offerings to the free folk—married with trappings of a life of wealth—honey wine to spare; clothes that show both wear and a determination to keep them tidy; a weapon fit for a rich man’s violence in the corner. A man who moves among the common and suffers the indulgence of the wealthy; only a few types of men would know that sort of life. She has the shape of him.

“You are a bastard, born to a nobleman.”

“That is not my dream,” he is quick to tell her, but his nerves betray the closeness of this truth. A bastard fit with the rest of the picture, and few noble ladies would claim their bastards. Women bear a disproportionate shame when they succumb to desire. If this man has known a wealthy patron’s favor, it would be from his father.

“No,” she concedes. “I come to that. You knew a fine lady in your father’s house. The details of her face are lost to you, but when you close your eyes and dream of her, it is the same lady. You know only that she is beautiful, that she loves you and that spites her family to have you. She is promised to another, but it is you she takes to her bed. She chooses you with no regrets or concerns and does not shame you for the circumstance of your birth.”

He is silent, abashed by his desires, she thinks, but his lip curls after a long moment. “You have two more guesses.”

Stunned, she taps a dainty fingernail to her teeth to keep from calling him a liar. Her irritation is fleeting. No, she can see she was wrong. This man is pretty, and his scars give him an air of danger. He is a catch to be had by maid or matron, high or low, without embarrassment—a temptation for a highborn lady, a touch of class for a commoner. He would not be refused any bed he sought. Then he must seek something else. What do bastards lack?

She clicks her fingers, startling him. His eyes have gone wandering again, his gaze recalled to meet hers from where it had fallen to her navel and traveled further south. A flare of pink rises in his pale cheeks at being caught out ogling her. She wonders if her words, wrong-footed as they were, inspired this lusty awe. She likes to think they have.

She clears her throat. “Your mother did not hold the lord’s favor long. Few ladies ever capture a roving eye for good.”

He sneers at this, the ugly expression interrupted by the thick lines of his scars. “Do you speak to my dream or my reality?”

“Of both,” she says, grinning. “For the one informs the other. Your mother cried when she lost him, but she was happy to have you. As will I be.” She stretches out her hand to ruffle the dark curls falling over his serious brow. He leans into it unconsciously until she says, “You look more like her than him.”

His shock is palpable, not at her words but at how easily he falls under the spell of her voice and the soothing caress of her hands. His voice is low, wary of her as he leans away and keeps his chin high. “My dream, lady? Speak to that.”

“You lost her too young, and your father, out of guilt, cared more for you than he would have otherwise. When you dream, your mother comes to you, to hold you and love you and kiss you. She tells you that she is proud to have such a fine son, and blesses away any bad things you think about yourself. Sometimes, you dream your father has never left either of you. That he makes you and she his true family.”

His eyes are shining, no tears yet, but she can taste them and they are bitter.

“I am sorry to cause you pain—”

“One more guess, lady.”

A most _un_ -ladylike snort escapes her, incredulity shattering her sympathy. This time, she cannot stop her spitting tongue. “I name you a liar,” she all but shouts, hands balled into fists on either side of her thighs.

“Unkind and untrue,” he counters, holding up his closed hand. “One,” he says, raising his first finger, “I have my mother’s color but the features of the man who gave me to her, or so I am told. Two—” he extends another finger, “My mother was kidnapped by the man who sired me. If she believed herself in love, I never heard about it because, Three: she died birthing me.” The third finger is accusing; the fourth is dismissive. “Four: the man who should have been my father deserted my mother when it suited him, so I do not dream of reuniting with him in joy. Nor revenge because…” He extends his thumb.

“Five: he is dead, too,” she finishes for him. A massive oversight—how had she missed all the signs? His melancholy, his solitary bearing. She lost herself to the romance of her own narrative and ignored too much. His face is screwed up in distaste and self-loathing; he may not dream of his father or his mother, but he has wanted for so long to belong somewhere. That need disgusts him, and he thinks it a weakness. Belonging, though, that is the key to him. Her eyes squeeze shut, tries to find purchase for that thought. Where is home for a man of no parentage, no specific station in life, with no family or friends to claim him? Where can he belong? It is at the tip of her tongue.

His soft brown eyes find her blue ones, and now it is he who pities her. “Have you another fiction to entertain me, or can we end this now?” A long silence stretches as she grasps for a tale of truth and fantasy. In the midnight woods beyond the bark shingles of his shack, the wind carries an eerie song. One voice, lifted to the night, is joined by another, and then another. He holds his breath, cocks an ear to the music of the night creatures. And then she has her answer.

“They think you a wilding,” she murmurs, the picture becoming clearer with each word. “They were glad when you left because they were afraid what it would mean if you could belong with them.”

His baleful stare is his only answer; by now, he is wise to the way she begins to weave her magics and does not interrupt. Moreover, he is still distracted by the wolves outside, for only wolves raise such sorrowful songs. That will not do. She grabs his chin, forces him to focus on her, only her.

“You were glad, too, at first. You thought to find your place. Instead, you have known hardship—cold, and hunger. But exhaustion brings heavy sleep, and when you close your eyes, you know none of these things. You dream on all fours. You are with your pack, and your pack is with you. You hunt better, faster, more cunning with tooth and claw than ever you did with arrow or lance. When you speak, others speak with you, to you, as equals. You run, you play, you kill, you fuck. You dream you are not alone.”

All signs of willfulness, spirit, strife fly from his expression. She has him at last, there can be no mistake. She leans into his face, chin still held firm in her grasp. “You dream of making love to a wolf woman, to be and to have a wild thing without shame.” She breathes the words against his lips. He licks them again, catches a taste of hers in the process and his body trembles. He sighs, reaches out to tangle his fingers in her hair. He brushes the slope of her breast as he does so, sending shivers along her spine.

He surrenders. “Very well, close enough.”

She means to question him on where she has gone so wrong as to be only _close enough_ , when he envelops her in his arms, pulls her onto his lap, and seals his mouth over hers. His kiss is reverent and then insistent. When she does not open her mouth to his, he moves to place gentle kisses along her jaw, then her neck. Victory, like a scream, swells her chest, her cry of triumph transformed into words she does not realize she is speaking at first.

“Then I may stay?”

“You have guessed my dream, nearly.”

She pushes away from him and catches her nails in the leather of his jerkin as a warning. “Nearly!”

He laughs, a bright, joyous sound heretofore unknown in him. “You have won, lady. Is that not enough for you?”

She scoffs, “To think I came to repay your kindness and I have had to work for the privilege.”

He pauses, looks up into her eyes. “My kindness?”

“The mead outside your door,” she whispers, rubbing her thumbs over his fine cheekbones. “A gift to the Free Folk. A prayer for their favor. And so I came.”

He blinks, unbelieving. “You aren’t—how could you be?” He holds her at arm’s length, as if her body, bared to him from the first moment he set eyes on her, were in possession of some impenetrable secret. As though it should have shifted and changed before his eyes at her words. His frank stare leaves he feeling truly naked for the first time.

“So few keep to the old ways,” she says, crossing her arms over her breasts, suddenly shy. The movement breaks the spell of disbelief. His expression of wonder narrows down to suspicion and fierce rage. She tracks the direction of his gaze to the legacy of trauma mapped out on her arms. His anger is not with her, she understands.

“If more honored the old ways, that would not have happened to you.” It is not a question.

“I ran from a cruel man, long ago. I never thought to seek out another. I would have hidden in the home of my mother for all time.”

He reads into her hesitation, places a gentle hand on her upper arm strokes the skin there. He goes from primal, to brutal, to tender so quickly, she almost misses his prompting question. “But?”

“I am like your dream—a wild thing that cannot be kept, not by my mother or anyone.”

He draws her back into his solid embrace, draws her head to lay it against his shoulder. She slides her arms around his neck, lets out a quivering breath. “Then I cannot keep you either,” he curses, his heavy breath lifting the hair over her ear, which he, again, tangles around his fingers.

“But you can have me now,” she promises, pulls back enough to nuzzle her nose against his. “Ask me to soothe your heartache, and I will, for a time. Have me, as reward for keeping faith with my kind.”

“No,” he says, his refusal at odds with his uninterrupted exploration of her hair, his attention fixed on her lips, and his manhood swelling between her legs. “No,” he repeats, “Not as reward. I’ll have no woman for obligation.” He lays his forehead against her own, sharing a long, shuddering breath with her. “If you would have me, lady, do it because you have won me. Or take me for your own want, not for favor owed. Have _me_.”

“Easily done,” she says, and that is the truth. He has made the offer, and she can accept what she could not otherwise take. She laughs, amazed; it has never before taken this long to tempt a man. It feels novel and perilous.

She pushes on his chest until he rolls back onto the straw, and she plucks at the ties holding his jerkin together. He has no similar duty to attend with her, so he is content to touch and learn her body as she strips him. His hands wander freely over the skin of her arms and legs and belly and back. His fascination with her hair is unabated, his interest in the russet thatch between her legs scarcely less so.

“Lucky,” he says, toying with strands of her hair.

She stretches out over him, leaning in for a kiss that lingers, that deepens as he opens his mouth to her. He must give himself, and so he does, opens his mouth to accept her tongue, to twine it with his own. The straw pricks her back as he twists to bear her down onto it. He pulls his tunic over his head and then his bare chest slides along her own. Her nipples pebble as he works them with his hands. Her hands are free to continue undressing him, to pull at the laces on his trousers until they are loose enough to push away from his rather shapely rear and down his legs. He leans back, turns away from her to kick them off, along with his boots.

It takes too long, though, and she drapes herself over his back while he struggles. He yelps when her roving hands reach for his small clothes, reach inside them.

“Careful, lady,” he admonishes, “or it will be over too soon.”

She ignores him, wraps her legs around his waist from behind and wrenches him off balance to his side. “Not soon enough,” she purrs, releasing him only to mount his lap and drag him up to sit between her legs, his knees bent behind her. “All night, you would have denied me, kept me waiting.”

Her fingers curve into claws, and the thin cloth between them tears away. He groans as he is freed, keens as she grinds down the wet center of her against his shaft. He is frantic, his mouth finds hers again and his tongue invades as his fingers slip between where they are almost connected. She is not the only one too long denied, and she would wonder at his thought to refuse her were it not for the talent of his hand. The coarse pads of his thumb and forefinger pinch and slide along her slick folds and send shocks along her raw nerves. His need is too great for deft technique; hers is too great to require it. All the grace woven into her being shakes to pieces as pleasure wracks her body so, so soon but not _too_ soon.

He marvels at her, and she knows she must look a frightful, fearsome beauty. A wild thing, in his bed, as he has dreamed. Her thoughts stay wild as her spirit comes down from the skies above, comes back to her body, spent and draped over his. He kisses her neck up to her jaw, and as he sees her rousing, bends her back against his knees. She falls, boneless, and his lips are, in short order, at her breasts, his beard scuffing the sensitive skin there. His tongue darts out to flick her nipple, first one, then the other.

A roar burbles up from her belly and out her mouth and this time she shoves his shoulders hard into the straw. He reaches for her, any part of her, but she smacks his hands away. Her skin is on fire, her core is tight and throbbing and he hasn’t even…

“Have me,” she whimpers.

He wastes no time. He gives his cock two pumps with one hand and slides his other to open her. She cannot breathe until he slips into her body. When he does, she gasps; he stutters something she does not catch—an oath or a curse. She rocks back and forth without pattern or method, adjusting to the stretch of him inside of her, seeking that peak a second time. The rub outside is delicious and withholding, too much and not enough until he starts to cant his hips just so before matching the friction inside to that outside. He digs his fingertips into her waist and the curve of her ass, trapping her in a coherent rhythm that sets them both to panting.

He is close when he cries out, distracting her pace. She opens her mouth to ask a question, and he surges up into her. She clings to him as he throws her over backwards into the straw, braces himself on his forearms, and drives into her. Each throw of his hips abrades her sensitive flesh, draws a grunt from him and a moan from her. There is only the slide and thrust of him, incoherent murmurs and encouragements, and then she is on the other side of pleasure once more.

She does not remember losing herself until she comes back to her body with his weight upon her, his head laying on her chest and his seed drying on her belly. Time has flown, if the dying embers of his fire are any indication. His breathing is slow and weighted. She hums sweet nonsense as she tracks beads of sweat at his hairline. This rouses him somewhat. He turns his face back and forth, rubbing his nose up into the crook of her neck before he rolls off her. She misses his weight, curls onto her side to keep him close, chasing a great comfort unlike any a man has offered her. He responds in kind, seeking and finding the same. They are at peace.

Still, she cannot resist some mischief. That is just the way of her.

“Close enough?” She prompts him.

Groggy, and half-asleep, his laugh is muffled by the flesh of her body. “Can you not let that go?”

“Never.” She prods him, tugging on the hair of his beard. “Close enough?”

He blinks open heavy eyelids, takes a deep breath, yawns. “You said I dreamed I made love ‘to a wolf woman.’” His smile is sluggish but persistent on his kiss-swollen lips. “Not so much a dream now. Close enough to my dream then.”

She pokes him in the ribs, a jab in a sensitive spot. “Close enough?”

He buries his nose in her hair, inhales deeply. “I don’t dream of taking a wolf woman. I have dreamt of taking a woman _as a wolf_.”

She lifts his head, cradles it gently, offers him her lips once more, which he takes. Rested now, his passion is roused just as his confession is raising something in her. When he draws back from a kiss that has stolen the breath from them both, she leans up to press her forehead to his temple, to put her lips near his ear.

“Then make love the way wolves do,” she counsels him. “Wolves use teeth. And tongues.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1) This literally started because I thought “free folk” and “fair folk” sounded similar. Also, I have been watching American Gods.  
> 2) I started shipping this in season 6, after liking NEITHER character in book or show. A year later, I haven’t read anything else.  
> 3) This is the first part of an eventual series. There will be smut later, too, but there is more actual story I want to incorporate. Hope you enjoyed!


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